Mobile devices such as cellular telephones, PDAs, etc. are proliferating like never before. Almost everyone has some sort of mobile device, and some people have multiple devices. Users can access several different networks using a single mobile device, and can access voice, text, and multimedia data from other network entities such as servers and other mobile devices. Further, mobile device complexity is increasing, with more and more advanced and power efficient processors, display interfaces, and applications to provide a user experience like never before. Such devices include, for instance, the iPhone, iPad, Droid, and other PDAs/netbooks. Consequently, users are using their mobile devices more frequently, and have larger bandwidth requirements for data, email, voice, etc.
This increased usage puts an increased strain on the wireless networks that provides these services. Even with the advent of 3G and 4G networks that use Internet Protocol (IP) addressing, Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), etc., there are certain network elements that get overwhelmed and can create a bottleneck for data flow, such as cellular base stations (or NodeBs) and their associated gateways. Several users within the range of one or more base stations who are downloading high-volume data from the network will have greater transmission power requirements from the base station. This may cause reduced signal strength per mobile device, and consequently a lower quality connection. Transmission power control can alleviate some but not all of these issues. This further causes higher battery usage on the mobile device itself.
The above-described deficiencies of conventional mobile device location data sources for transportation analytics is merely intended to provide an overview of some of problems of current technology, and are not intended to be exhaustive. Other problems with the state of the art, and corresponding benefits of some of the various non-limiting embodiments described herein, may become further apparent upon review of the following detailed description.